Android Wear, is now, safer than ever

In the days we are living in, one of the most important things to take care of is…security. In this overly-connected world, you don’t know who might be trying to get into your privacy and steal all your personal data and stuff (especially if you are aware of all those data breaches that happened to several companies during the past couple of years). So, that’s mainly the reason why Google (that includes Android, obviously) has been implementing a pretty good two-step verification system that allows the users to keep their info safer than before, because it asks the user for a code that has to be sent via SMS or Email to the associated in the account info.

Safer watches, safer people

As you might know, the Androidwear, can be connected to any Android smartphone to work as a second screen, with really helpful info, and of course the time, but have asked yourself, how secure is that? If you think about, it could be found by someone and that person could see a lot of your private info. With that in mind, Google has enabled the two-factor authentication from your Google account to be available in your AndroidWear too (for some devices at least) and you have three options for logging in with a phone. A 2FA app generated code as ‘Authy’ or Google Authenticator, the good old SMS method, and the prompt you on your phone to approve a sign-in attempt (it requires to have Google Play Services enabled).

So, do I have it or not?

Some people is reporting that the aforementioned prompt is appearing on some AndroidWear devices where the user has enabled and up-to-date Google Play Services. Previously, the AndroidWear would only show the code generated by the Google Authenticator app. This seems to be part of Google Play Services, which the AndroidWear has deep integration with, of course. This is a really welcomed change to the way it used to work. Beside of that, some users has been complaining about being currently not working on all devices, but there’s also a bunch of guys informing the exact opposite to that, it is supposedly working amazingly. Given the recent update to Google Play Services as well as the AndroidWearapp, it might be a necessary combo, for this almost ‘magic’ thing to work. Anyway, it’s nice to see Google keeping things a little simpler on Android systems where extra security is a real priority.

An extra layer of security

Two-step verification is a significant improvement over the traditional security methods because it represents an extra layer of security to our Google account. Basically, in addition to the username and password, you will have to enter a code that Google sends you via SMS (once the session is started, otherwise it will not work, but that’s pretty logic). This drastically reduces the chances of someone else getting unauthorized access to our account since that person would need to access our phone too in order to get into our precious data. On the other hand, we can authorize our computer for 30 days at the first access, allowing us to keep the ‘comfortable’ (but, very vulnerable) and previously learned traditional access method. Even, though it might not seem important, I really recommend you to try it out, because it can help you to keep all your sensitive data safe in your Google account, since you know that nobody –who doesn’t have your phone—will be able to access to any of your important things or contacts.